Nature Protests

The End of Ecology in Slovakia

by Edward Snadjr

Publication Year: 2008

As societies around the world are challenged to respond to ever growing environmental crises, it has become increasingly important for activists, policy makers, and environmental practitioners to understand the dynamic relationship between environmental movements and the state. In communist Eastern Europe, environmental activism fueled the rise of democratic movements and the overthrow of totalitarianism. Yet, as this study of environmentalism in Slovakia shows, concern for the environment declined during the post-communist period, an ironic victim of its own earlier success.

Cover

Frontmatter

Contents

Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

The study of social movements has long been a central
area of scholarly inquiry. Such movements range widely from political
protests by and for indigenous peoples to aspirations of northern middle
classes for cleaner air and water, safer playgrounds, and healthy food.
Social science inquiry into social and political...

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

The research for this book was made possible by grants
from the National Science Foundation, the International Research and
Exchanges Board (irex), and the Fulbright Institute for International
Education (iie), as well as by support from the American Council for
Collaboration in Education and Language Study (accels) and the
Thomas Kukuika Memorial Scholarship...

1. Communist Environmentality

In the process of building socialism, nature was
regarded as a passive entity and,with trademark Marxist rationality, designated
with the simple status of material resource. Nature was not a
political subject, such as literature, or a trade union, or religion. It was,
rather, in the state-socialist imagination, a concern of the scientist and
the engineer...

2. Hatchets versus the Hammer and Sickle

Against the efforts of the socialist regimes in the
Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union to subdue and control culture emerged
the dissident.Dissidentswere peoplewho did not necessarily reject socialism
but who were dissatisfied with the status quo, did not agree with the
methods or the manner of the regime's power...

3. "Bratislava Aloud"

No one gazing on the landscape of east europe in 1987
would have predicted-and no one in the West did predict-that communism's
total demise would occur only two years later. Hindsight now
affords us the ability to tease out the clues-some glaring, some not so
obvious-that suggested what was about to happen. Throughout Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union...

4. Nation over Nature

On december 10, 1989, slovaks were allowed to leave
their country freely for the first time in over forty years. On that day,
border officers cut through the barbed-wire fencing separating a corridor
of overgrown grass along the perimeter of Petrzalka from the manicured
meadows and fields of Austria...

5. Argonauts of the Eastern Bloc

Freedom is like an open sea. while one has the choice
to go in any direction, there is also the possibility of losing one's way. If,
by the end of 1992, freedom had emboldened Slovaks to part ways with
their Czech partners, freedom also brought widespread and remarkable
changes to the newly independent state...

6. Returning to the Landscape

If slovakia's landscapes had changed significantly
since 1989, one thing remained the same: in the summer Slovaks still left
the city for rest and relaxation. Like elsewhere throughout East Europe,
in Slovakia August is the traditional vacation month.A visitor to the capital
city during this month, perhaps on a side trip from Vienna...

7. Conclusion: Slovakia in an Age of Post-Ecology

In the early morning hours of a september saturday in
1995, a line of people waited patiently on the edge of a sleepy Bratislava
square for Eduscho, a new Austrian-owned coffee chain, to open. They
had responded to an advertisement in a city weekly for free packets of
coffee, which the store was offering to promote...

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